Advertising's Role in the Ideology of Consumption

Notably, Smolla's contentions are made largely from an intellectual perspective outside of much of our commercial­speech culture, a perspective that assumes (or privileges) rationality and individual self­determination. But, as emphasized in Commerce & Communication, product­image, product­ personality, and lifestyle advertising make no serious effort to address audiences in a rational manner as individual economic decisionmakers. ⁵⁷ These forms of advertising often work best when they invite us to set aside precisely the questions Smolla asked of his friends and colleagues. Having largely buried those questions, can consumers really be expected to resurrect them so as to indict themselves?

Predictably, the subjects of Smolla's polling experiment would not regard themselves as irrationally influenced and profoundly transformed by modern advertising. Even if consumers distanced themselves from their own consumption habits so as to evaluate their behavior more honestly and critically, it would be impossible for them to imagine who they would be in a culture in which consumption is not a governing ideology. Simply consider America's most favored public forum­the shopping mall. Commenting on the more than seven­acre Mall of America in Minneapolis, Alan Durning of the Worldwatch Institute demonstrates the extent to which consumption has become an American institution:

We visit [shopping malls] more often than we go to church, and our teenagers spend more time there than anywhere but home or school. (Ninety­ three percent of teenage girls rank shopping their favorite activity.) Malls have become the town squares of our public life, and the brand names and chain stores they host have become the icons of our popular culture. ⁵⁸

Hence, what must be asked is not whether one is injured personally in any physical or psychic way by fleeting and momentary dreams of being "like Mike," but rather whether such dreams generally influence the extravagance of consumption.

Moreover, our overall portrayal of the commercial culture does not turn on assessments of the seductive power of particular advertisements to dictate particular buyer behaviors. As Leo Bogart forcefully puts it: "[Advertising's] importance lies not in having elicited a specific purchase response to a specific ad. The real significance of advertising is its total cumulative weight as part of the culture­in the way in which it contributes to the popular lore of ideas and attitudes toward consumer products." ⁵⁹ It is the essential role of advertising in developing the consumer culture's pervasive ideology­that we regularly identify ourselves by our habits, patterns, and communities of consumption­which is the focal point of a perspective more complex and dynamic than Smolla indicates. ⁶⁰ In part, this perspective informs Sut Jhally's account of consumption as "an inherently social activity, not an individual one." ⁶¹ So in his unrestrained reply, Jhally admonishes us "to put aside such ideologically inspired idiocy" as "the prevailing nonsense about the marketplace of ideas and advertising as a form of information." ⁶²